What I've Learned: Mel Brooks

The iron test is: Do you laugh? If you laugh, you know they're gonna laugh.

I had a lot of uncles who thought they were funny. But you know, the funniest thing about them is that they were incredibly short.

Never stand up straight. That's what World War II taught me. Number one, you might be picked for detail. Number two, the Germans have a better shot at you. Even now, I'm in a perpetual crouch so that nobody picks me for extra duties.

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My meals at home when I was a kid were like going to the diner. It wasn't the same meal for everyone. If I asked my mother for peanut butter and jelly, that's what I got. And my brother Lenny, he was such a picky eater. Only the top of the banana. The rest of us didn't even know which was the top and which was the bottom. But Lenny knew.

I watched so many westerns when I was a kid. Gene Autry or Roy Rogers would be sitting around the campfire playing the guitar, and you could see these tin plates and beans. And I always wondered: How many beans could you eat and how much black coffee could you drink out of those tin cups without letting one go? I don't know if Blazing Saddles was the first movie to have a fart in it. But when I went to work on it, I said: Let's tell the truth of the campfire. So we got a bunch of guys around a microphone, soaped up our armpits and . . .

It's not like I've got these lines in a trunk that are waiting to come out in the next show. But when I'm writing a song that references body organs, you can bet genitalia will be at the top of my list.

Doesn't matter how old I get or how many problems I've solved. I still find myself scratching my head and thinking, Shit, how am I going to get outta this one?

My father died when I was two and a half and my mother raised four boys without a husband. Well, she had this one guy. We couldn't talk about him because we lived in a Jewish neighborhood and he was Italian. His name was Tony, so we called him T. T drove a garbage truck. We'd all get in the front of the garbage truck and go to Coney Island. You know what the great thing about going to Coney Island in a garbage truck was? In the twenties and thirties, the garbage trucks were big. People got out of the way. So you were sitting up there like a king.

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Funny depends on coincidental circumstances.

You build a wall of comedy one brick at a time. If something doesn't work, you've got to dismantle the wall and start all over again to make sure the bricks are interfacing and that they architecturally support the idea. The premise has to be solid or the comedy isn't going to work. When something isn't working in Act Two, sometimes you have to go back to a reference in Act One that wasn't developed clearly enough to get the explosion you want later on.

Risk means guessing at the outcome, but never second-guessing.

Money is always important because money is a by-product of success. If you're making money, your show is good. If you're making money, the public is loving it. So it's not the money, it's the success. Besides, I live downhill from a large extended family, and it's very easy for them to walk downhill.

If you take risks, you are going to fail. When you do, my advice is to watch Swing Time with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Fred falls in love with Ginger on the street and follows her to a dance studio. She's a dance instructor. So he enrolls to learn how to dance. He's madly in love with her, so he keeps on falling, slipping, you know, to prolong the lesson. He can't get it, just can't get it. He's on the floor after falling for what must be the eighteenth time when Ginger tells him, "Give up, honey. You'll never learn to dance." The owner of the dance studio hears this and says to her, "How can you tell this man he can't dance? You're fired!" And Fred says, "No, no, she's taught me a lot. Let me prove it." And so they get up and start in on this song that goes: "Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again." You were waiting for that Fred Astaire explosion, and when you get it, it leaps over your expectations. You'll never see a more thrilling dance in your life. That's the kind of stuff that I love. Give them what they expect and then try to top it.

Good comedy is never frivolous. It's based on human experience, on human adventure, on human feelings. So it has to be profound.

A woman once asked me: "What was your greatest time on earth?" And I said: "From one to nine. After that, it's been all downhill." She was surprised and asked me why. I said, Because my mother loved me, my brothers loved me, and every day after school we would play ball in the streets. Life was sweet potatoes, punch ball, and ice cream. Before nine, I didn't do a damn thing but smile. I didn't even know we were poor. Then at nine, I found out about homework -- and it never stopped. From nine until now, at eighty, there are tasks. Duties. Things are expected. People are paying more than a hundred dollars to see a show. They expect a great show. I gotta deliver.

You could never give your mother as much as she gave you.

Young Frankenstein, a musical version of Brooks's 1974 classic, is now playing on Broadway.

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